Car Guy

Lee Iaccoca, who died this past week at the age of 94, will be remembered as a majestic but flawed automotive genius.  Trained as an engineer, he made his name as a salesman. And one trait balances out the other, given the complex career he had as the president of the Ford Motor Company and the chairman of the Chrysler Corporation.

Iaccoca rose to fame in the sixties when he sought to create a product for Ford's namesake brand that would capture the youth market, and he and Ford product planner Hal Sperlich devised a low-slung, sporty coupe that would be based on the humble Ford Falcon sedan.  That car became the Mustang, and it would soon evolve from a fashion statement into a serious sporting machine, begetting numerous high-performance variations like the Shelby models, the Mustang GT, and the turbo-four-powered Mustang SVO (my favorite), many developed long after Iaccoca left Ford.  The Mustang (the first-generation model shown below with Iaccoca) is now the last passenger car in Ford's North American lineup.  

When he moved to Chrysler, just as the company was dealing with bankruptcy, he went to Washington for a government bailout of $1.5 billion in loan guarantees and caused great skepticism from legislators (including Gary Hart, then representing Colorado in the Senate) who didn't want to sink money in a failing enterprise.  Iaccoca got the loans.  Then he helped bring the compact K-cars - sold as the Dodge Aries and, below, the Plymouth Reliant, then later as the second-generation Chrysler LeBaron - to market, and their basic engineering, ample passenger room, and front-wheel-drive layout made them huge successes and ushered in an era of front-wheel-drive cars that would persist well into the twenty-first century.  On the strength of that success, Chrysler paid back its loans in 1983 - seven years in advance.

Incredibly, small front-wheel-drive sedans were an idea Iaccoca brought to Ford chairman Henry Ford II, who said no to the idea, and Ford nixed another idea suggested by Hal Sperlich - a compact "people mover" car, in the shape of a delivery van, that could fit into a garage.  At Chrysler, where Sperlich was already working when Iaccoca arrived, both men gave the "people mover" project top priority . . . and the modern minivan was born.  Although Dutch auto dealer Ben Pon is regarded as the father of the minivan for suggesting to Volkswagen in the late forties that a van could be built on the Beetle's chassis, it was Chrysler under Iaccoca that made the minivan a mainstream passenger vehicle rather than the funky hipster wagon that the Volkswagen Microbus was.  Below is the Dodge Caravan from its first model year, 1984.

However, Iaccoca also had his blind spots.  Though he rightly gets credit for coming out with the right products at the right time, he staked his reputation on some rather crummy cars as well.  The most notorious example is the Ford Pinto, which became infamous for its gas tank being placed so dangerously close to the rear bumper that a rear-end collision could cause it to explode.  I always wonder why, if Iaccoca felt that a subcompact Ford was necessary for the U.S. market in 1971, he simply didn't have the early-seventies European Escort (not to be confused with the American Ford Escort of the 1980s or 1990s) made here.   

Also, Chrysler's main product under Iaccoca was obviously pedestrian, as the K-cars and the K-car-based minivans were meant to be basic transportation for Middle America.  There's nothing wrong with that.  What was wrong was when Chrysler tried to build different models for different and more exotic market segments.  Iaccoca, recognizing the versatility of the K platform, chose to develop all future models on the same mechanicals that supported a Plymouth Reliant or a Dodge Caravan.  This led to some cars that were automotive poseurs, like the Dodge Daytona sports car, shown below in Turbo Z trim.

Looks pretty slick, huh? Well, appearances can be deceiving.  It's based on the same bland Aries sedan that populated the driveways of America at the time, with the same 135-cubic inch inline four, only the Daytona Z, as you have already gathered, had a turbocharger (but the base model didn't). I entered a contest to win a Daytona when it first debuted as a 1984 model, and I even test-drove one, a mid-level turbo model. Nice ride, but not remarkable.  I wasn't so disappointed when I didn't win one.  (Someone in Georgia did.)

Then Iaccoca tried to convince us that this sedan was worthy of taking on German sport sedans.

The Dodge Lancer looked sort of sharp, and it had a European-style hatchback with a notchback roofline, but under the hood was that same 135-cubic-inch inline four - with a turbocharger, of course - and the car rode on the same basic, bland K platform.  (Which is why Tom and Ray Magliozzi, the hosts of NPR's "Car Talk," once called Iaccoca the "master of smoke and mirrors.")  Many times, to create new cars, Iaccoca had the basic K platform stretched or shortened for longer or shorter wheelbases, respectively, but the engineering remained meat-and-potatoes even when it should been something closer to gourmet.  Iaccoca had a simple strategy - stick with a winning platform, develop all your cars on it for different market segments, and you can't go wrong.  This strategy helped Chrysler do good business for awhile, but it hindered development of newer, more sophisticated platforms and suspension.  Not to mention engines - Chrysler stuck with the same basic four-cylinder engine design throughout the eighties while other manufacturers were developing multiple-cylinder-valve technology and coming up with more advanced fuel injection systems.   

As for luxury cars, Chrysler's experience with them in the Iaccoca age are a mixed bag.  Iaccoca was a product of the 1940s, and his tastes reflected that.  To him, a real luxury car had plush seats, a sumptuous ride, maybe wire wheels or wire-wheel hubcaps, and chrome - lots and lots of chrome.  While he did aim at baby-boomer tastes with cars like the Lancer, his heart was in re-creating the well-appointed luxury cars of Detroit's golden age that his generation had always coveted - and many times he reproduced that glitz and glitter in small packages, like the 1982 LeBaron, and also in one of his big accomplishments - the LeBaron convertible, which arrived on the market six years after the "last" domestic convertible rolled off a Cadillac assembly line.

We all laughed, didn't we? Especially when they came with fake wood paneling, like this 1983 model?  But it brought convertibles back in vogue in a big way and led to other domestic marques - including Cadillac - to introduce new convertibles of their own.  (The 1987 LeBaron convertible featured cleaner styling.)

Iaccoca even brought back the Imperial as a two-door coupe for 1981 on the company's antiquated rear-drive J platform, and though it was a sales flop, it was a beautiful car with an aura of exclusivity to it (Chrysler planned to make only 25,000 Imperial coupes a year but never made more than 9,700 a year in its three years of existence). It was definitely classier than the big coupes Cadillac and Lincoln offered at the time.

Less successful was when Iaccoca tried to make a full-blown land yacht, with all the gaudy touches that implied, out of a smaller car.  Below is the early-nineties Imperial sedan.

Bob Lutz, the legendary auto executive who has worked at all three major American automakers, had an Imperial sedan while at Chrysler, but it was customized to look and feel more European, as Lutz found Iaccoca's tastes to be rather tacky when it came to cars.

Iaccocca was still successful enough to be seriously considered for the Presidency, which he ultimately resisted.  A moderate independent, Iaccoca was a man whose politics were ambiguous but whose identity politics were well-defined; as an Italian-American, his ethnic pride was reflected in some of the decisions he made as Chrysler CEO, like buying Lamborghini (now owned by Volkswagen).  And the less said about the TC, the car he developed with Maserati, the better.

Iacocca's reliance on the tried-and-true could only work for so long, and by the early nineties both he and his cars had turned into parodies of themselves.  Always a star of Chrysler commercials, he began to seem ridiculous with his use of the catchphrase, "If you can find a better car, buy it!" - which was what happened when auto customers found Toyotas.  Quality control at Chrysler was always a problem, and his attempts to invest in defense and aviation companies didn't make the company any more financially secure.  But he ended his tenure as Chrysler chairman on a high note, introducing the LH sedans that pioneered cab-forward design, placing the driver's position farther to the front and creating more passenger room overall.  Also, it featured six-cylinder engines rather than turbo fours.  Below is the 1993 Dodge Intrepid, one of the cars produced on the LH platform.

Some of Iaccoca's accomplishments have been vindicated by time.  The exorbitant amount of money he paid to buy American Motors and acquire its Jeep brand in 1987 raised eyebrows, but it proved to benefit Chrysler in the long run, given the growing (and admittedly insufferable) popularity of SUVs.  And truth be told, the LH sedans would not have been possible without the sophisticated layout of the Premier, the sedan American Motors had developed with Renault before Chrysler inherited it.  He could also be duplicitous, though, as when he promoted the employment of airbags in Chrysler vehicles even though he had opposed federal airbag regulations while at Ford, or the fact that the original Chrysler minivans, while serving most people as station wagons, were registered with the government as trucks so they could comply with fuel economy standards less stringent than those for passenger cars.  (This discrepancy would provide all automakers in the U.S. market with the impetus to push sport utility vehicles over standard cars.)

Also, he had a big ego.  Part of the reason Henry Ford II fired him was because he couldn't stand his desire to be in the center of attention.  This may explain why Hal Sperlich, who, as noted, was instrumental along with Iaccoca in creating Mustangs and minivans, doesn't get the credit for them that he deserves.  But, on balance, Iaccoca was a great and endearing figure in the American automobile industry.  He was patriotic in his devotion to the American car business, and he gave back by leading the foundation that would restore the Statue of Liberty for its centennial and, later Ellis Island, as he was the son of Italian immigrants.  He pushed hard to create good product, he advocated hard work and persistence, and he never stopped believing that Chrysler could be the best car company not just in America but the world, as this old Chrysler commercial from the start of the 1985 model year - one in which he says his sport sedans can compete with the prestigious German marques - demonstrates.

I close with a first-person reminiscence. I admired Lee Iaccoca for his gumption, and I liked some of the cars Chrysler made on his watch.  I too, like many others, thought he should run for President.  But I also had a connection to Iaccoca through two degrees of separation; his friend from his days in his native Pennsylvania, advertising man and sculptor Jay Dugan, was my great-uncle.  I'm sorry my great-uncle Jay never introduced me to Lee Iaccoca, because I know I would have loved talking cars with him.  I might have even made some suggestions to him regarding Chrysler product, and as you can guess from this blog entry, I would have had plenty of them.  But his competitive nature and his drive to succeed, something lacking among us Americans these days, will be as missed as much as Iaccoca himself.  RIP.